The first detailed analysis of Native metalworking in the Protohistoric/Contact Period.

From the time of their earliest encounters with European explorers and missionaries, Native peoples of eastern North America acquired metal trinkets and utilitarian items and traded them to other aboriginal communities. As Native consumption of European products increased, their material culture repertoires shifted from ones made up exclusively of items produced from their own craft industries to ones substantially reconstituted by active appropriation, manipulation, and use of foreign goods. These material transformations took place during the same time that escalating historical, political, economic, and demographic influences (such as epidemics, new types of living arrangements, intergroup hostilities, new political alliances, missionization and conversion, changes in subsistence modes, etc.) disrupted Native systems.

Ehrhardt's research addresses the early technological responses of one particular group, the Late Protohistoric Illinois Indians, to the availability of European-introduced metal objects. To do so, she applied a complementary suite of archaeometric methods to a sample of 806 copper-based metal artifacts excavated from securely dated domestic contexts at the Illiniwek Village Historic Site in Clark County, Missouri.

Ehrhardt's scientific findings are integrated with observations from historical, archaeological, and archival research to place metal use by this group in a broad social context and to critique the acculturation perspective at other Contact Period sites. In revealing actual Native practice, from material selection and procurement to ultimate discard, the author challenges technocentric explanations for Native material and cultural change at contact.

Kathleen L. Ehrhardt is Research Associate at the Illinois State Museum in Springfield, Illinois.

"This is an impressive work, a benchmark study that has important implications for the way archaeologists look at the interaction between Natives and Europeans."—Marvin T. Smith, coauthor of Coosa: The Rise and Fall of a Southeastern Mississippian Chiefdom

"This book is a notable addition to the growing literature on technology transfer during European colonization, and an excellent illustration of the value of the concept of technological style."